Singer, Songwriter, Worship Leader Scott Wesley Brown will be in Concert at Oakbrooke Bible Church in Waterford, MI on Friday, October 21 at 7:30 pm. He will also lead worship for the God and Culture Conference on Saturday, October 22. Paul spoke with Scott on Friday, October 7, 2011:
Category Archives: Today’s News
Acton’s Jordan Ballor on Abraham Kuyper
The Acton Institute in Grand Rapids has undertaken the Abraham Kuyper Common Grace Translation Project. From their press release:
In November, Christian’s Library Press is publishing Wisdom & Wonder: Common Grace in Science & Art, a new and complete translation of two sections that were inadvertently omitted from the first edition of Kuyper’s larger three-volume work on common grace. These sections were first published separately and then added in later editions of the three volume set. Kuyper’s timeless work shows us that God is not absent from the non-church areas of our common life and bestows his gifts and favor to all people.
Popular in our time for his devotional material, Kuyper’s Wisdom & Wonder displays his talents as a public theologian, focusing on his comprehensive and Reformed vision of science and art.
As evangelicals face massive cultural shifts, the question hangs in the air: How will they respond? What evangelicals believe influences how they respond and this will have significant ramifications for the future of a free society and its business, economic, and public sectors.
Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction, says that the appearance of this treatise in English translation “is for me the beginning of a larger dream come true. Kuyper’s writings on common grace are much needed ‘for such a time as this’ andWisdom & Wonder is a marvelous foretaste of more that is to come!”
Sometimes the way forward is found by looking back. Wisdom & Wonder provides insight for the road ahead, appearing with a foreword by Gabe Lyons and Jon Tyson and an introduction by Vincent E. Bacote, associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and author of The Spirit in Public Theology: Appropriating the Legacy of Abraham Kuyper. The volume is edited by Jordan J. Ballor and Stephen J. Grabill and translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman.
Paul spoke with Acton’s Jordan Ballor, co-editor of the first volume in the project, on Friday, October 7, 2011:
Steve Jobs: Blind Visionary
Enough will be written about Steve Jobs, and with much more eloquence than I am capable of. Suffice it to say, Steve changed the world. He changed MY world. In all the same ways he changed yours.
Steve Jobs gained the world, but sadly he did so at the cost of his soul. This is Steve Jobs at Stanford University on June 12, 2005:
You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
And later in the same speech, this:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve’s philosophy of living by “your own inner voice” and following “your heart and intuition” without regard to objective truth – especially as that truth is revealed in the word of God – is humanistic and eternally fatal.
Death is not the single best invention in life. It’s an enemy. It is the consequence of the very philosophy of life which Steve encouraged those kids on a beautiful spring afternoon at Stanford to pursue: don’t listen to anyone or anything but yourself and your own heart. “As by one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Adam followed his heart, and we followed Adam into death.
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Out of the heart proceeds all manner of evil. Following your heart – unless and until it is transplanted by the Spirit and Word of God – will gain you the world but cost you your soul.
And when death comes, you haven’t merely been “cleared away,” Steve. Death is judgment – the physical consequence of the fall of Adam. And physical death releases the soul into the presence of the Creative Genius to whom we must give an account. The only way to truly live, Steve, is to live Someone else’s life. Crucified with Christ, nevertheless alive – not me – but Christ – truly living by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.
For all of his creative genius and vision, Steve Jobs was blind (it appears) to the light of the glorious gospel in the face of Jesus Christ. His vision changed the world. His blindness – his inability to truly see the only thing worth seeing – cost him his soul. Steve Jobs could see the future. A tragedy that he could not see eternity.
6th Circuit hearing arguments in Julea Ward’s EMU case today
From FOX NEWS:
An attorney for a graduate student claiming she was wrongfully dismissed from her counseling job at a Michigan college because she refused to work with gay and bisexual clients argued in federal court Tuesday that his client was discriminated against because of her religious beliefs — while the school insists her actions violated school policy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati heard arguments in the case involving Julea Ward, a Detroit-area public school teacher. In July 2010, a federal judge dismissed Ward’s lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University (EMU) after the school successfully contended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics, which forbids counselors from discrimination in clinical practice.
Acton Institute: Abraham Kuyper on The Separation of Church and Art
From the Summer 2011 Issue of Religion & Liberty:
Artistic genius and nobility of soul are not mutually exclusive, and wherever artistic genius may dwell within a noble soul, how could the artistic eye be closed to the entirely singular exaltedness that focuses on the name of Christ? Why should an image, an embroidered scene, an oratorio, or a hymn be produced only for ecclesiastical use in order to inspire the gifted creator of these artifacts with sacred passion? Art also enjoys its lower and higher spheres of development, and how could it be any other way than that in its higher spheres art must ascend to the sublime, and in that sublimity, it automatically encounters the wonders of religion, incorporates them, and reproduces them in artistic form?